City Advent Calendar: Day 21
Posted by CapnRex101,
The impressive series of minifigure-scale toys continued on day twenty, yielding a miniature addition to the LEGO City Mining subtheme.
Perhaps these toys will continue for the rest of the calendar.
Once again, my predictions have gone astray! This decorative candy cane clock looks marvellous and certainly seems like something that one might find in Santa's village. Its striped red and white design is quite attractive, consisting of alternating 1x1 round bricks as well as a 1x1 brick with a stud on the side where a green leaf is attached.
However, the highlight of this model is definitely the printed clock face. This component was originally created for 71040 Disney Castle and has since appeared in two other sets so it remains relatively rare. The traditional numerals look fantastic and I like the ornate hands too. My only minor complaint with the clock is the curved section of the candy cane which looks slightly awkward to me. Perhaps a design using macaroni pieces, like in the Friends Advent Calendar, would have been more appealing.
Overall - 4.0 - I am quite pleased with today's model and it certainly feels suitably festive as we approach Christmas Day!
41 likes
12 comments on this article
I thought for some reason it was a lighthouse at first, I like it a lot
It feels like the clock-face piece is wasted on the candy cane base? I've never seen that clock piece before, that is beautiful, but I'm not so keen on the contrived candy cane element.
It looks weird. Not bad, just really, really weird.
The shape looks like as if an ordinary modern-style street lamp were wrapped in decorative paper or foil to look like a candy cane.
Lego was trying too hard on this one.
Fun little build, and the printed clock is a very nice part.
This is at least a 4.5 for me. The curve is not the best though. Macaroni peace would be too big, maybe two of those 1x2 curved bricks, which is white here?
The curve does look odd, but that click piece is awesome! Never seen it before though.
I really tried not to post, since I don’t have anything nice to say, but there are too many folks defending today’s build. The other side needs mentioned!
Sorry, but this is pretty bad. If it’s a lamppost wrapped, why would it be so different in style and especially height from the other. The shape for a candy cane has been done better in nearly all examples of a LEGO candy cane; it’s nice that they are trying new designs, but shouldn’t a new design only be approved if it’s better? If this would have shown up in a past Friends calendar, it would have been torn apart by LEGO fans.
Does this City calendar have a theme that when everything is put together as a display, it’s going to *look* like a coherent scene like in the past? I know there have been a load of mini-scale builds of proper kits, a weird ice cream dispenser, a mix of figures, some minifigure scale rides with nonfunctional ramps, and a nonfunctional soccer net with a flat ball. What’s the display value here?
Friends’ calendar builds in the past were rather lackluster, but they really did come together to make a nice play and display scene on the box flat. (I can admit that the first year for Friends was not great, and I didn’t get the calendar last year, but it also seemed weak.)
I understand “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and all the junk, but come on... look at this thing... It looks like—and is the right minifigure-scale height to be—an outdoor shower (which would help explain the soccer net).
^ I'm with you man, this thing is hideous and the clockface, while nice, looks completely out of place on this build.
I'm just excited about the printed clock face. I haven't seen it before since I haven't gotten the Disney Castle or Assembly Square. Using the spare red 1x1 helps the candy cane a little, imo.
@ericjohn:
But then you get into all kinds of trouble when trying to determine if it's a "better" design or not. Since any retrospective article will find people picking out all sorts of old builds as their favorite example, we can assume this works going forward as well. How do you enforce a rule like that when "better" is in the eye of the beholder? Whoever designed this probably likes it better than previous candy cane designs, or they wouldn't have come up with this design. They're also limited in several ways. For any set, they have limits on what parts are available to choose from, and how much they can pack into the design based on the price point. For Advent builds, they also have limits based on what will physically fit in the compartment. These all combine to limit just how much you can do in terms of a candy cane. Designers probably also like to come up with new stuff rather than just churn out the same designs year after year, which would explain why they never repeat the same streetlight designs in the Winter Village theme. So, even if they don't feel it's better, they aren't really doing their job if they just keep rehashing the same stuff.